Publishers (e.g., service and content providers) desire to download unsolicited content to user's storage devices in the hope that users will eventually consume the unsolicited content for a fee, thus increasing their income. The practice of publishers storing unsolicited contents on storage devices without asking users' consent, hoping that the users will consume these contents for a fee, is a concept known in the media publishing field as “predictive consignment”. However, unsolicited content may remain stored in a storage device without the user of the storage device knowing of its existence or wanting to consume it. Storing unsolicited content in a storage device reduces the available (i.e., free) user storage space on the storage device, which is undesirable from the user's point of view. A user may find that there is less space in the storage device for the user's own content (e.g., a music file) because someone else (i.e., some publisher) has taken over part of the storage space on the storage device, or that the user may have to reclaim the storage space so taken by deleting the unsolicited content.
Mobile handset users tend to store content they generate or obtain. Users often store content they intend to share with others or to store for future use in a remote repository such as a personal site on a server where they maintain an account. To this end, users will try to upload the content they store in the storage device. However, the storage device may be occupied with all the content that publishers store in it. Indeed, users are not always aware in advance of their storage space limitations, nor are they aware of the network traffic load when they attempt to upload their content to a remote, external site, until they encounter a problem.
Thus, a need developed for a new technology that intelligently manages handset storage, such that a user is free to use their storage space without penalty when the user desires to perform actions such as uploading a file to an external location or pre-staging a file for upload to an external location, while still enabling content owners to push content to handsets.